brainwagon

While at the ballgame earlier this week, I found myself wondering whether the classic 7th inning stretch song, Take Me Out To the Ballgame was in the public domain. It is, having been written in 1908. You can read the Wikipedia entry for more information, and can even get a PDF of the sheetmusic or […]

My baseball calendar informs me that on this day in 1988, the Red Sox traded two of their minor leaguers for pitcher Mike Boddicker. Boddicker was no slouch, going 7-3, 15-11 and 17-8 in his two and one half seasons with the Sox. The players they gave up? Three time All-Star utility outfielder Brady Anderson […]

Last night my loving wife took me to watch the A’s take on the Mariners. While the Mariners’ star has seemed to have faded, I still love to watch Ichiro bat. Not enough to see them beat the A’s mind you, but he’s always trouble on the bases. It seemed only fitting that he would […]

After penning the article below, I was looking for a picture of the elusive Walter Carlisle (didn’t succeed), but I did find a nice page at the Library of Congress Website that has some nice pictures that you can download. Digging around more, you can find their collection of 2100 early baseball cards. I’m listing […]

I was tearing off sheets for my daily calendar which lists achivements in baseball, when I encountered the following: July 19, 1911 Walter Carlisle makes an unassisted triple play for Vernon of the Pacific Coast League. What’s so unusual about that? Carlisle is playing center field at the time. Blink blink. Here’s some additional information. […]

Bukiet and Harold wrote a paper entitled A Markov Chain Approach To Baseball, which details their use of Markov models to study hitting order and the effect of trades in baseball. Yang and Swartz wrote a paper entitled A Two-Stage Bayesian Model for Predicting Winners of Major League Games uses a much smaller set of […]

On this date in 1990, the New York Yankees were playing against the Chicago White Sox at Comiskey Park. The Yankees pitcher Andy Hawkins gave up no hits, and ended up losing the game and never being credited for the no-hitter. In the eight inning, the Yankees gave up four unearned runs on three errors […]

Taking a cue from Tom Mangan, I decided to participate in his proposed Blog Me Out to the Ballgame 2004 extravaganza. Carmen and I got some cheap view level tickets, and were treated to a beautiful day at the ballpark, baking in the sun amidst the wide variety of individuals who form that eclectic group […]

The conventional wisdom of baseball is that five game series are easier for bad teams to win than seven game series. But how much easier? I made a graph: The red line is seven games, the blue, a five game series. The difference is about 3% max.

Tom Mangan proposed a blog-in at the Athletics-Giants game on June 27. I don’t have tickets yet, but I may have to give the idea a try (and catch a baseball game to boot!). Check out Blog Me Out to the Ballgame 2004 Addendum: Yep, just got some View level seats: I’ll be there, and […]

I was mulling over the mathematics of the World Series in one of my more bored moments, and decided to write some simple Python code to test an idea. The question underlying these graphs is essentially this: given that the probability of Team #1 winning any individual game is a probability p, what is the […]

After the Athletics previous road trip, I felt I had plenty to be worried about. The A’s hitting (especially their ability to hit with men in scoring position) was so anemic that I felt that even if Hudson, Mulder and Zito turned in good performances, the A’s could still pull out a defeat by simply […]

Okay, okay. I’m still on the baseball kick. Sorry for all of you who are bored with this topic, but I couldn’t help myself: metafilter had a link to a guide to keeping score in baseball. Until I started attending baseball games and sitting in good seats, I never saw anybody do this, but I […]

I was watching the Oakland A’s game against the Chicago White Sox in preparation for sneaking out of work for today’s day game ($2 tickets? How can you resist?) and was treated to “bonus baseball”: a twelve inning game in which the role of hero was played by Bobby Kielty, who hit his first career […]

Amazing what you can find when you dig. On retrosheet.org you can find box scores for lots of games. Pretty cool. For instance, I dug up the box score from an interesting game I attended. The date was Sept 5, 2001. I was anxious to go to this Wednesday game because this would be the […]